Injustice for All (9 page)

As soon as I saw Darrell Watkins, I recognized him. I had indeed seen pictures of him. Politicians are never as tall or as good-looking as their publicity shots make them seem. Darrell Watkins was no exception. He was three or four inches shorter than I am, maybe five-ten or so. His face boasted classically handsome features topped by dark brown wavy hair, but a hint of potbelly protruded over his belt. A little too much of the good life showed around the edges.

Beside Darrell walked a taller, distinguished-looking man with a shock of white hair.

There was a definite family resemblance. Homer Watkins, although pushing seventy, carried himself with the easy grace of an aging athlete. His son might have gone to seed, but not Homer. I looked at them with the kind of curiosity one reserves for snakes in a zoo. They didn’t look like evil incarnate, but they had made Ginger Watkins’ life hell on earth.

Huggins walked forward to greet them, waving back the crush of newsmen, photographers, and cameras that swirled around them. Ginger would have been offended that the aftermath of her death created a media event that would give her candidate/widower hours of free broadcasting coverage and hundreds of newspaper column-inches all over the state.

I thought I was going to be sick.

“Hey, Beau, are you all right?” I had turned my back on the me18e and was walking away. Peters followed.

“I’ve got to get out of here,” I groaned. “I can’t stand this bullshit. “

I continued walking. Peters worked his way back through the crowd to redeem his car.

I was several hundred yards down the road by the time he caught up with me. He pulled alongside. “Get in, Beau. Don’t be a hard-ass.” I was too sick at heart to argue.

“The press was handling Watkins with kid gloves,” Peters said apropos of nothing.

I glowered at him. “What did you expect?”

Peters shrugged and broke off any further attempt at conversation. In the silence that followed, I tried to come to terms with what had happened. How could Ginger Watkins be the lifeless form slouched in my car? And what could I have done to prevent it? And where the hell was Don Wilson? Ralph Ames waited for us in the driveway outside the Mansion. “I heard,” he said as I dragged myself out of the car. “Is there anything I can do?” “Not unless you can figure out a way to bring her back.” I choked out the words and beat it for my cabin, leaving Peters and Ames standing there together.

I didn’t want to talk to anybody or hear any mumbled words of sympathy. I didn’t have any right to sympathy. That was Darrell Watkins’ exclusive territory.

I threw myself across the bed, aware of a faint trace of Ginger Watkins lingering in the bedclothes. I wanted to lock it out of my consciousness, but at the same time I wanted to hold onto it. There was a gentle tap on the door. Ames came into the room, alone. He sat down on one of the chairs beside the table. For a long time he sat there without speaking. “You can’t blame yourself,” he said at last. “Why not?

I never should have let her go alone.”

“It’s not your fault.”

I wanted to bellow at him, to rant and rave and vent my anger and frustration. “It is! Don’t you see that it is?” Ames remained unperturbed. “It was an A.A. meeting, is that right?” “Yes,” I said wearily.

“How long had it been since she quit drinking?” My anger boiled back to the surface.

“She wasn’t drunk, and she didn’t commit suicide. Doesn’t anybody understand that, for God’s sake?” He ignored me. “It’s possible, Beau. She had lost a good friend the day before-“

“Goddammit, Ames, I’m trying to tell you. Something happened between us. She didn’t want to die.”

Ames studied me carefully. “I see,” he said slowly. He rose to his feet. “I’m sorry, Beau. I didn’t know.” His quiet understanding rocked me. Hot tears rose in my eyes.

I didn’t bother to brush them away. Ames paused in the doorway. “It’s still not your fault,” he added. The hell it’s not, I thought savagely as the door closed behind him. Wilson was here all the time, and I let her walk right into his trap. I don’t know how long I lay on the bed. Long enough to get a grip on myself. Long enough to know that if I walked outside I wouldn’t embarrass myself and everyone around me.

I had been awake all night. Exhaustion claimed me, and I slept. In a dream Don Wilson and Philip Lathrop were together, both locked in the same cell. Armed with a gun, I tried to shoot them through iron bars. Each time I pulled the trigger, nothing happened. They laughed and pointed, both of them, together.

I woke in a sweat. Peters was sitting in the chair by the window. Ginger’s chair.

“Bad dream?” he asked.

Not answering, I heaved my feet over the edge of the bed and sat there with my face buried in my hands, hoping the whole thing was a nightmare. It wasn’t. Ginger Watkins was dead.

“They’ve released your car,” Peters said.

I felt as if I’d been shot. “They’ve what?” “Released the Porsche,” Peters repeated.

“Had it towed into Ernie’s Garage in Eastsound.”

“That’s impossible! Murder was committed in that car. No one should go near it until the crime lab has gone over it with a fine-toothed comb. ” “They’ve gone over it, all right. Not with a fine-toothed comb. The consensus is that she went drinking instead of to her meeting. They’re treating it as a DWI, calling it an accident, pending the outcome of the autopsy. They found an empty vodka bottle in the car.

The San Juan County Sheriff’s Department says it can’t afford to be responsible for a car like that. Too valuable.”

I got up and went into the bathroom, where I splashed my face with cold water. My square jawed reflection in the mirror was haggard, drained. When I came out of the bathroom, Peters hadn’t moved.

“It wasn’t an accident,” I said.

“How are we going to prove it?”

It took a few seconds for the meaning of his words to sink in, to understand that I wasn’t in it alone, that Peters would helpand so would Ames, for that matter. But even though his “we” eased my burden, the question remained: How would we prove it?

“Drive me to Eastsound,” I said. “I want to talk to the mechanic. ” :’Huggins says he’s tops.”

“Sure he is. In a backwater like this, you can just bet they’ve got a top-drawer mechanic. He’s probably one step under highway robbery.” We got into Peters’ Datsun.

He managed to drive us to Eastsound without having to pass the duck pond. “Are you going to tell me what happened?” Peters asked.

“No.” My answer was abrupt. “Not now.”

Peters deserved better than that. We had been partners for almost a year. He, more than anyone, had seen me through the Anne Corley crisis. I had learned to respect his quiet reserve and to tolerate his health fetishes. In the world of partners, alfalfa sprouts are a small price to pay for someone you can count on.

He didn’t take offense. He brought our discussion back to the Porsche. “Huggins says Ernie can dry it out. If he gets to work on it fast enough, he might be able to prevent it from mildewing.”

“So by releasing the car, Hal thinks he’s doing me a favor?” Peters nodded. “God damn him,” I said.

Ernie’s Garage wasn’t tough to find. It’s the only one in town. I walked into the clapboard building, wondering for a moment if anyone was there. “Just a sec,” an invisible voice called.

A mechanic’s dolly wheeled out from under an upraised pickup. On it sat a man with his left leg missing below the knee and his left arm missing below the elbow. Where his hand should have been, a complicated metal gripper was strapped to his arm with a leather gauntlet. The gripper held a small wrench. Ernie Rogers had bright blue eyes, a curly red mustache, and a shiny bald spot on the back of his head. “How’do, mister,” he drawled. “What can I do for you?”

“That’s my car over there,” I said, pointing. The Porsche huddled in a darkened corner of the garage.

“She’s a pretty little thing.” He clucked sympathetically. “Too bad about what happened.”

“Huggins says you can dry it out and get it working. That true?” He nodded, removing the wrench from its gripper and wiping his metal hand on greasy pants in the typical mechanic’s gesture. “It’ll cost you,” he said. “How long you had ‘er?”

“About six months.”

“Ever done any major repairs on a Porsche?” Ernie asked. He was still sitting on the dolly, squinting up at me.

“No,” I said. “Never have.”

“I gotta take the whole damn thing apart, clean it with solvent, dry it, and put it back together.”

“How much?”

“Six or seven grand.”

In the old days, that’s how much I would have spent on a brand-new car. Luckily, these weren’t the old days. “How long will it take?” “Depends on how soon you want me to start. Should do it as soon as possible if you want to save the interior. It’ll take timea couple weeks, maybe. I gotta get the money up front, though. Know what I mean?” In the old days I never would have had a checking account with ten thousand dollars in it, but Ames had made me open a market-rate account. I pulled the checkbook out of my jacket pocket and wrote out a check for seven thousand dollar;, payable to Ernie’s Garage. I handed it to him. He looked at it, folded it deftly with one hand, and stuck it in his overall pocket.

“Thanks, Mr. Beaumont. That your phone number on the check in case I need to get ahold of you?”

“Yes. Keep track of your expenses. The insurance company will reimburse me.”

Peters and I started toward the door. “I’m sorry about the lady in the car,” Ernie said. “She wasn’t your wife or anything, was she?” “No,” I said. “We were just friends.”

The lie came easily. Ginger had said the same thing about Sig Larson. I wondered if she had told the truth.

Chapter 13

PETERS stopped at the front desk and bought a paper. He showed me Sig Larson’s picture on the front page. “Max’s interview with Ginger should be there,” I told him.

He flipped through the pages and double-checked the index in the bottom corner of the front page, looking for Cole’s City Beat column. “It’s not here, Beau,” he said.

“I looked.”

“But he said it would be in today’s paper.”

“So he lied,” Peters said. “What else is new?” Peters sorted through the paper and removed the crossword puzzles, setting them aside for me to work later. “I’m going up to my room to get some rest,” he said. “Ames wants to go back to Seattle on the sevenforty ferry tonight. You’re welcome to ride along.”

“Let me think it over, Peters. I can’t quite see the three of us crammed in that Datsun, but-“

“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” he told me. “It’s a hell of along walk from Anacortes to Seattle.”

I accompanied Peters as far as his room. When he went inside, I knocked on Ames’

door. Ralph was sprawled on his bed with the contents of a briefcase strewn around him. “Working on Peters’ case?” I asked. He nodded. “Are we going to win?”

He looked at me squarely. “Maybe. Maybe not. Our best bet is to work out a negotiated settlement instead of going to court.”

“Will they settle?”

He shrugged. “Justice is blind. Money talks. They’ll settle if the price is right.”

“It pisses me off to think of donating money to that ranting, chanting asshole.”

It was my money. Although I was willing to do whatever was necessary to buy Peters’ kids a chance at a normal childhood, it still made me mad.

Ames regarded me mildly. “You want to bail out?” “Hell, no. I just don’t like that guru making money hand over fist. “

Shaking his head, Ames gathered up his papers and shuffled them into a neat stack.

“What do you want, Beau?”

I eased myself into the chair by his window, aware that my back hurt. Despite the nap, fatigue railed at me from every muscle in my body. “I want to offer a reward.”

“For what?”

“For information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or persons who murdered Sig Larson.”

He picked up a yellow pad and a pen and made several notes in his small, cramped handwriting. “I can do that,” he said. “From an anonymous donor, I presume?”

I nodded.

“How much?”

“Five. “

“Thousand?”

I nodded again.

“Anything else?”

My mind started to click, like a car that has to be jump-started but runs fine after that. “What are you going to do, once you finish up in Oregon?” “Go back to Phoenix.

Why?”

“You told me I ought to do some investing, remember?” He nodded. “What do you have in mind?”

“I understand there are a couple of condo projects in trouble in Seattle. Maybe now would be a good time to look into one of those. Would you mind sticking around and researching them?”

“Not as long as you’re footing the bill.” I got up to leave. “Are you coming back to town tonight?” he asked.

Pausing at the door, I considered my options. Riding with Ames and Peters would be physically uncomfortable but convenient. “No,” I said, making up my mind, “I have some thinking to do. I’m better off here, away from everybody.”

“And because you think Don Wilson is still on Orcas?” He caught me red-handed. “So what?” I flared. “I’m on vacation. I can do as I damn well please.”

“You don’t have any objectivity in this case, Beau.”

“Don’t lecture me, Ralph. I’m your client, not some halfgrown kid. ” I stormed from the room, slamming the door behind me, knowing he was more than half right.

I headed for the Mansion and the Vista Lounge. I wanted the taste of McNaughton’s in my mouth, the feel of an icy glass in my hand. I almost ran over Maxwell Cole, who was about to climb into the hotel room in front of the building. I was surprised to see him. I thought he was already gone.

“What happened to your column?” I asked sarcastically. “Miss your deadline?”

“Deadline!” he echoed. “If you’re talking about the piece I wrote yesterday, the one on Ginger Watkins, I didn’t miss the deadline. ” “So where is it?” I was looking for someone to bait, and Cole was a likely candidate. His handlebar mustache drooped lopsidedly, making him look more dreary than usual.

“They spiked the son of a bitch. The scoop of the year, and they spiked it!”

“Who did?”

“Beats the shit out of me. One minute it was in, the next minute it was out. My editor isn’t talking.”